Saturday, August 06, 2011

Another day at the office...

Apparently the helicopter that went down was carrying some guys from DEVGRU. No word if they were the same guys who pulled off the Abbottabad raid (and we may never know, at least officially.)

If so, it's a reminder of the ops tempo that SOCOM has been dealing with for ten+ years now. The media only notices them once in a blue moon, when something big like taking down Bin Laden happens, as though they'd been sitting around waiting for something to do, twiddling their thumbs since the Battle of Takur Ghar.

UPDATE: Latest RUMINT is that none of the operators on board were the guys from Neptune Spear... (...who are probably busy elsewhere already.)

Tam, You hit it on the head. Their OPTEMPO is insane and it's a testament to their skill that we haven't lost more. You keep hitting the snake but eventually he gets his strike in also. Course, if we followed An Ordinary American advice above, it would be a mute point.

Couple of years back, remember a bunch of the Usual Suspects decrying all the spending on choppers and tanks and so forth and asking "Why don't we just make a lot more of these special forces teams to do the job?"And when they got slapped in the face with just what it takes, in training and equipment for a team, they didn't like that, either. And it really seemed as if they simply COULD NOT UNDERSTAND that not every troop is capable of filling one of those positions; they've been playing "Everyone is SPECIAL!!" for so long they just can't seem to get it through their damned heads that "No, they're not."

The guys, their families, such an awful thing. And all that experience. 25 DEVGRU operators x a minimum 10 years on the teams + however long they were on DEVGRU = a minimum 250 years of warfighting experience is gone. You could wipe out a regular infantry company and not lose that, to say nothing of the 160th guys or the AF Special Tactics members, who were probably as experienced. Such a shame.

I did wonder what height they were flying at that would cause total fatalities. The Chinook is a tough bird, and if they were anywhere close to the ground, it would take a pretty big hit for the 160th guys not to be able to get it down with some survivability.

No, it is not chance that these wonderful young men were thrown away for nothing by career building generals and admirals. It is not chance that we are destroying our young people, our wealth, and our power in the sort of war that is designed to destroy them. It is not chance that our masters are indifferent. It is not chance that all this is a fantastic test laboratory for the serious future enemies.

We lost a whole Chinook load (including the CO of ST-10) during REDWING.It hurts. Still, one of the unwritten "SOF Truths" is that we lose guys. Even in "peacetime" we used to lose them in training (still do) and now we lose some in combat. As for Afghanistan not being "worth it"; that may or may not be true, but we're not fighting FOR Afghanistan so much as fighting IN Afghanistan - and a lot of other places beside - and I'm NOT counting OmaMao's little adventure sorties over Libya.

Who are we fighting? Ironically, the proxies of Pakistan's ISI, a tiny faction of the muj who largely sat out the Russkie war and were therefore in a position to be manipulated into a position of power afterward.

You think Islamabad wanted a hostile Hindu state to the south and a hostile Pathan one to the north?

The current rulers of Pakistan may be benefitting as an unintended consequence of some of our actions, but that's not why the guys and gals are there.I hate your masters too, but they're not my masters.